About Synthetic World

Synthetic World explores and celebrates the world of synthetic and
electronic music (EM). Find out what's happening at the cutting edge in
The Buzz (and Beep). Read about your fav electronic
artists. And find out about the coolest instruments, both past and present, and the
geniuses behind them.

There was a time when all music was made with natural sounds: the vibrating strings of a piano or harp, blowing through a flute or oboe,
striking a drum. Even the sound of a modern electric guitar still comes from vibrating strings, percussion still from hitting a drum.
Synthesizers on the other hand are a different kettle of fish. A mass of mysterious circuitry, oscillators, filters, and usually plenty
of flashing lights and a rat's nest of cabling. And yet from these, apparently from nowhere, the most otherworldly sounds emerge.

One of the earliest synthetic instruments dates back to 1893, over forty years before the great Bob Moog was even
born. Weighing in at a mere seven tons (its successor weighed two hundred tons), it wasn't exactly portable, but it was revolutionary.
It was more than just a synth and anticipated the whole concept of streaming media a hundred years before the Internet. Then there were
the Futurist artists of the early 20th Century. Rejecting the past and all sentiment for it, they celebrated anarchy and embraced the
heady excitement, grime and raw power of machinery that was surely the future. Marinetti wrote in 1909 "Do you want to waste the best
part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past?" To the Futurists, the past was dead and the future belonged to man and
inhuman machine. The Futurist artist Luigi Russolo performed with his 'intonarumori' (or 'noise instruments') back in 1913, though the
audience's pleas of "no more" by the end of the first part went in vain as the performance lumbered on regardless. And who can forget
the eerie, sometimes haunting music and sound effects of 1950s sci-fi classics such as War of the Worlds and The Day The Earth Stood
Still, or the Doctor Who theme tune from 1963, all produced on the most rudimentary equipment.

The equipment is, of course, only the means. It's the artists, some famous, others all but forgotten, who've shaped
the synthetic and electronic music of today. Pioneers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Delia Derbyshire, Klaus Shulze, Edgar Froese, and many
more who embraced the latest technology of the time and turned it into art. Find out more about the great
artists of synthetic and electronic music...

But without the instruments, none of this would be possible. The abilities - and sometimes limitations - of the
instruments themselves often influenced the direction of electronic music, sometimes taking it in an altogether new direction. The
arrival of samplers such as the Fairlight is a great example. Find out about many of the instruments that make synthetic and electronic music a reality...